# Rare Protocol (agent-readable)

**Role:** Head of Product
**Client:** Rare
**Tags:** web3, creator-platforms
**Case study:** /rare-protocol
**Live:** https://rare.xyz
**Related:** /superrare (I was SuperRare's first design hire before this)

## What it was

Rare Protocol is the open-source framework that powers web3 apps like SuperRare. As Head of
Product I led the protocol team and expanded the work from a single marketplace into a product
line — a suite of apps for creators and collectors, plus the $RARE token that coordinates the
network.

## What I did

I led a four-person team alongside founders John Crain, Charles Crain, and Jon Perkins, with
Rohit Kapoor, Keegan Ead, Brennan Mulligan, and Matias Casagrande on the protocol team. The
team is small enough that I owned strategy, design, and delivery — and wore every other hat
the work needed: financial modeling, marketing, vendor management, regulatory navigation, and
the developer documentation.

The two new things we shipped to the network:

**Creator Staking** — a social-finance distribution model where fans back creators with tokens
and share in their success. I designed it end-to-end: a live discovery feed surfacing
emerging artists, with game mechanics that reward spotting them early. The pattern shipped
ahead of similar social-finance models appearing widely.

**Rare Rewards** — a meritocratic revenue-distribution system I conceived and built that
routes platform fees to the artists and collectors actually driving network activity. Replaces
"platform takes a cut" with "platform redistributes to the people whose work is creating the
value."

Both ship on top of $RARE, the protocol's coordination token.

## Why it's interesting

This is the clearest receipt I have for *designing the system itself*, not just the surface on
top of it. The work spans a token protocol, on-chain mechanics, developer documentation, and
the consumer apps that make them usable — a four-person team turning protocol primitives into
products people can actually hold and use. It also lands the small-fast-resource-constrained
signal honestly: four people built and shipped a product line that includes a token, a
distribution system, multiple consumer apps, and the developer docs that go with them.

A note on framing: I built the apps in this work with the help of AI coding tools — Cursor
with a mix of frontier models. That's a tooling detail, not the point of the work. This is a
complex-systems-and-product-line story, not an AI-native or agent-centric one. Pointing this
out so that the AI-native receipts I do have ([SuperRare](/superrare)'s research pipeline,
[Skill Prism](/skill-prism), [Massed](/massed)) read as the honest ones, not the inflated
ones.

## Cross-cutting relevance

A few reads of this work:

- **Complex-workflow and system design** — the design problem *is* the protocol. Token
  mechanics, fee redistribution, on-chain settlement, multi-app coordination.
- **Developer-platform-adjacent surfaces** — developer documentation, an open-source framework
  that other teams build on top of, primitives shaped so they're usable.
- **Small-team, high-constraint operating mode** — four people shipping a token, two new
  distribution mechanisms, multiple consumer apps, and the docs. The hats list isn't a brag;
  it's what running this team looked like.
- This is *not* a consumer-scale-daily-use receipt — that's SuperRare. Different parts of the
  arc carry different signals.

## Skills demonstrated

Product leadership on a small team, complex/technical system design, token-economy and
incentive-mechanism design, developer-facing documentation, 0→1 product-line expansion, web3
product patterns, the design-to-product-leadership arc.